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ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

ATIs RADEON 9000 is somewhat deceptively named itd be easy to think of it as the next logical step up from the RADEON 8500 series...

The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

John Gillooly takes a ride with the limousine version of ATI’s luxury card.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

Although ATIs Radeon 7500 does not feature the new Charisma Engine II, with technology such as Truform, Smartshader and Hyper Z II, it is still a very competent graphics card targeted at the mid-range 3D graphics market.

It has been a long time coming, but finally there is some serious competition to the mantle assumed by the behemoth that is NVIDIA. The Radeon 8500 is the latest graphics chipset from ATI, which itself is a graphics giant, though does not possess nearly the same public profile in the consumer 3D market. Unlike previous ATI cards that featured exclusively on ATIs own branding and PCB, the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are open to other board manufacturers, presumably to take a bigger bite out of NVIDIAs lucrative market share.

New Radeons optimised for Vista and HD video.

There was once a time when 3dfx ruled the 3D accelerator market, but...

Another of the RADEON 9200 cards in this round-up. Returning almost identical results to the Auriga 9200, this is an average performer, bundled with an outdated game.

This card is the same card as the Bravura Evil Master II, but without the retail extras thrown in. The card itself is a fairly plain-looking affair - a simple green PCB (printed circuit board) with a small cooling fan and heatsink over the GPU, and an array of RAM modules absent of the large RAM heatsinks now commonplace on the NVIDIA models.

Anyone with $400 to spend on a graphics card should currently be looking at a RADEON X800 XL. It boasts the same 16 pipelines as an X800 XT, and also packs 256MB of GDDR3 memory to boot.

With NVIDIA's new graphics chip still a couple of months away from reaching retail stores, ATI's RADEON 9700 is still the undoubted king when it comes to performance: if you want the fastest card available, then you can't go past the 9700.

ATI’s new RADEON is impressive...

With a price beaten only by Apple's iBook, Targa's offering to the multimedia market segment could easily be confused for their budget line of products. Clocking in at only 1.5GHz, this isn't the beefiest CPU in our roundup, but the 64MB of dedicated video memory, based on ATIs Mobility RADEON 9600 generation GPU, helped carry it through.

You pay for what you get online, or do you? Ron Osborn tells a tale of confusing branding and high expectations.

In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

It was tough deciding an overall winner for this Labs. There can be no doubt - if you're looking for brute speed, then the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and RADEON 9800 PRO are the obvious choices, but we're not prepared to make a winner out of a graphics card that costs close to $1,000. For this reason, we've chosen the card we believe delivers the best balance of performance and price - which turns out to be the GeForce FX 5600.

Breathe some life into your old PC in time for a Vista upgrade with these budget AGP video cards.